– recapping the Development of Dry-Media Screen-Printing
The latest on what’s coming up……
The path to Wollemi National Park – April 2024
Wollemia nobilis branch with 4 leaf ranks and polar cap at the branch tip. (Photo Alan Tulloch, Mt Coot-tha Botanic Gardens, 2023)
Upcoming is my Artist Residency in April 2024 at Big Ci in Bilpin NSW, located towards the south of Wollemi National Park. Through this residency I will foreground narratives surrounding the Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis). I will create dry-media screens depicting the tree’s male and female cones, resin polar caps on branch ends, the bubbly chocolate-like bark, its pollen, seeds, branches (with their 4 ranks of leaves). I will use these screens to create a number of site-related narrative-imbued print performances. The progression of work up to and during the residency can be followed on Facebook and Instagram.
Overview of my Earlier Dry-Media Screen-Printings
A Tulloch, Vigil – Remembering Louisa Lawson, Powdered Rookwood Clay Dry-Media Screen-Print On Concrete Plinth, HIDDEN Rookwood 2022
Vigil, shown in Rookwood (NSW) Cemetery’s HIDDEN in 2022, is a print installation/performance representing Rookwood resident, Louisa Lawson (mother of Henry Lawson). Vigil is a composite of images derived from “The Dawn” (her journal for women, 1888-1905), historic photos and decorative lines on The Dawn’s Memorandum card. Through “The Dawn”, Louisa advocated the right for women to vote and was hailed as “The Mother of (Women’s) Suffrage”. Print ephemerality is the life of Vigil, foregrounding life’s vulnerability and how memories of significant persons can be written over by other forces. Vigil is an analogue 3D print in low-relief using powdered Rookwood Cemetery clay (without binding media). Wind, rain, scuttling leaves and scampering wildlife constantly threatened the printed images.
A Tulloch, Memoriam, Vigil Border, Analogue 3D Print, Rookwood Clay Powder, 2022.
My dry-media screen-printing continues to be experimental, still developing alternate ways for how each dry material can be made to exit between the weave of its steel mesh screen. This border was adapted from parts of a memorandum card printed on Louisa’s press. It was rewardingly printed as a high-relief 3D print, created by multiple squeegee pulls across the screen, slowly and increasingly elevating the screen above its substrate. Though this print exists as a mass of dry clay powder, it paradoxically has a lightness of being. The dry-media 3D effect can offer a range of connotations such as resting in peace or obsessive iteration/reiteration.
A Tulloch, Fracture, Louisa Lawson, Dry-Media Screenprint, Powdered Rookwood Clay, 2021.
Fracture is an off-register overprinting, somewhat fitting for my printing of Louisa Lawson. Although she had a successful writing and publishing career, she had several harsh breaks in her life including marriage breakdown; being thrown from a tram and incapacitated for a year; suffering from dementia and being admitted to a mental asylum by another son who consequently obtained some financial advantage. This demonstrates how my printing practice often finds new directions due to chance effects such as an accidental fumbling to pick up the large screen.
A Tulloch, Haunt, Print Performance, Coal Dust on Sand, 2016.
This is the beginning of Dry-media Screen-printing. It was a response to place – attending a science/art camp at Bimblebox Nature Refuge in Central Queensland above the Galilee Coal Basin where there was a continuing threat of coal mining approvals being successful. I painted an image of the Galilee Coal Basin on steel mesh inserted into a bamboo steamer basket and conducted a print performance, printing with powdered coal, repeating prints progressively into the distance. In video form, the performance was edited with remixed licensed music with a finale of me fading out in the distance to the sound of local Central Queensland birds and a refrain of haunting music.
A Tulloch, Being There, Dry-Media Screen-print, Powdered Charcoal, 2019.
Being There focusses on the threatened Black Throated Finch and illustrates how varied squeegee pressure and elevating the screen slightly above its substrate can feature in my print practice. It is as though the clear print at right looks on, but keeps back from, thinking, considering, and asserting against aberrated renditions of itself.
A Tulloch, Flaw, Dry-Media Screen-print, Gallery Floor Dust, 2017.
My dry-media screen-printing is open to chance happenings, evidenced by how a gallery visitor accidentally stood on my image printed on the floor at the gallery entrance. It couldn’t have been effectively staged (though I could have printed the image of the threatened Black Throated Finch out of harm’s way). The pattern of the visitor’s shoe sole on the print un/fortunately produced ‘a beautiful demise’ but ironically lifts to a different level where the human quest for beauty can obfuscate the tragedy in an image. This work also shows my adaptiveness in trying new media – deeerrrh, like adding someone’s shoe to my toolkit!
A Tulloch, Ascent, Dry-Media Screen-Print Installation, Semaphore Beach Sand on Building Steps Port Adelaide, 2020
Responding to architectural features, Ascent is a printing of different threatened animals of the Port Adelaide Enfield area as part of PAE’s Tiny Gems project. At the Big CI, I will likewise respond to different sites to amplify the work, always living with the reality that the images are at risk. In Port Adelaide I found that one dry-media image printed in a covered outdoor walkway lasted 4 days without suffering grief at the hands of an attentive cleaner.
A Tulloch, Float, Print Performance, Coal Dust on Water, Video Still, 2017.
Another remarkable feature with dry-media screen-printing is that some media will float on water. These images have a special fluidity, sometimes self-performing with images being broken up by currents beneath the water surface and in other situations distortable using instruments or bare hands. When using instruments or hands, it is not even necessary to actually touch the print as the surface tension can be manipulated to move images, giving an appearance of special or even sinister power at play in breaking up an image. In the case of videoing such print performances, the edit room can amplify, alter speeds, and reverse parts of the performance.
A Tulloch, States of Being, Tusked Frog, Dry-Media Screen-print, 2023.
I have been doing some preliminary experiments with moving screens during the printing of an image. Such a procedure can produce interesting and dramatic effects.
And the Art Snack Cafe cannot be left out….
A Tulloch, Art Snack Cafe – Reveal 2, Powdered Charcoal as Dry-Media Screen-Printed on Sand on Hands, 2023
In July 2023, the Art Snack Cafe (formerly 1994) was reformatted to present dry-media screen-prints, in performance mode, allowing Cafe visitors to become co-performers. Visitors were invited to immerse their hands into a bed of sand to receive items off the Cafe’s menu. The items were screen-printed, onto their hands, in the form of images of locally threatened-to-extinct animals. Visitors were then encouraged to gently move their fingers to ‘alive-en’ their image, adding life before having to take leave of their print. Images were printed with powdered charcoal, which is not simply an art material – it is incinerated life. The Cafe was presented to the public as part of Ipswich’s Spark Festival, 2023.
alan tulloch 